Raspberry Pi 5 - LA Machine Guns - Using Supermodel's Framerate Monitor - and Sinden Lightgun

Testing framerate of the Sega Model 3 game LA Machine Guns running in Supermodel on Raspberry Pi 5. Playing this with a Sinden Lightgun.

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Performance Summary
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The game consists of 5 stages.
00:52 - Stage 1: Almost perfect.
05:19 - Stage 2: Approx 50% speed
14:58 - Stage 3: Variable, but mostly approx 50% speed
25:21 - Stage 4: Perfect
32:25 - Stage 5: Perfect

Post production disclaimer: In the video I theorise that the variable speed is influenced by the amount of complex scenery is needed to be drawn at any given time, but this might not necessarily be the case as Stage 1 runs quite well and that is set in a heavy urban area too. But there is a difference, Stage 1's architecture is mostly block-shaped buildings so perhaps that's not such a drain on resources compared to the types of buildings and other small objects featured in stage 3. I don't know 🤷‍♂️ This is my best guess, why not share yours in the comments?


Technical stuff
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- My Raspberry Pi 5 is running the Bookworm 64-bit Lite OS, with RetroPie installed on top.
- Supermodel is from the "arm" branch of DirtBagXon's fork, which afaik is the only version for Pi that is kept well up to date with the mainstream branch, has multiple mouse support to enable two-player lightgun gaming and a realtime fps debug log.
- The Pi is overclocked to arm_freq=2750 & gpu_freq=950
- Supermodel's resolution is set to 517x400, which is not much above the original arcade res of 496x384

Installing Supermodel
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If you want to install DirtBagXon's fork of Supermodel, go to his GitHub at https://github.com/DirtBagXon/model3e... and copy the "wget" command to download the setup package onto your Pi, then you can install it in the same way as any other emulator from the Experimental section of RetroPie-Setup. Look for "supermodel3".

Using the FPS Monitor
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- If you want to enable the FPS monitor then you need to add a parameter to the emulator's command line.
- Open up the file "/opt/retropie/configs/arcade/emulators.cfg" in a text editor, find the line that begins "supermodel3" and add "-show-fps" to the command line before %ROM%.
- Mine looks something like this:
supermodel3 = "XINIT:/opt/retropie/emulators/supermodel3/supermodel3 -borders=1 -show-fps %ROM%"
- Or you could conceivably duplicate the line and give it a slightly different name so you have one that monitors the framerate and one that doesn't.

- To monitor the framerate you need to access the Pi's command line remotely via SSH using something like PuTTY.
- Launch the game as normal, then from the terminal type: "tail -f /dev/shm/runcommand.log"
- This will then start printing the contents of the log to the terminal window and each time a new line is added to the file, that new line is displayed in the terminal. It updates approximately every second.
- When you want to stop monitoring hit "ctrl+c".